Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

2004
by Scott Miller

Listen to a sample of the songs on the list - thanks to Steve Holtebeck

"The Party's Over" - Paranoids
Everything's right about this fantastically catchy recording. The party is over for the guy in the song, who's losing his date to the D.J. or worse, but the song itself is all timeless up-tempo rock deployed at the classic level of small combo economy one could expect from the likes of the Kinks, Attractions, or dBs. Thanks to Bradley Skaught for hooking me up.

"Lady" - Lenny Kravitz
Here's a big, unusual groove built around what may be the most underproduced guitar in any expensive recording. The chord progression goes off at some satisfyingly funny angles, and lyrically, well, when Lenny has this sophisticated lady, do you think he needs all his other ladies?

"Girls of Wild Strawberries" - Guided By Voices
Guided By Voices are in the business of getting to unusual frames of mind by methods that are nonstandard, if not unique in the world. This is something like the beat from (in my realm of experience) "Hey Little Child" played for jangling grandeur—it's hard not to think of being outdoors. As is a theme with Robert Pollard, there's a new feminine-borne, possibly Bergmanesque reality just over the horizon: "reminded who we are by the girls of wild strawberries."

"Summer Sunshine" - The Corrs
I have two young daughters and this is music I feel good about them liking—I first heard it used for a teen girls' dance number at an event I attended for my wife Kristine's solo ballet performance. The production conjures dependable emotional magic with the kind of technical competency I associate with, say, Studio Ghibli. The line "I've never felt so wanted" illustrates both an ability to speak directly and a moment where the lead melody does an especially nice turn.

"I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" - The Magnetic Fields
Pound for pound, their album I is even better than 69 Love Songs—although what a lot of pounds those were. This one doesn't showcase the acoustic sonics that are really the star of the album, but it's pretty close to being the best disco song ever. I can't decide if the words actually have extra zing because of their gayness or if that just retains a shred of shock value for me.

"Promising Actress" - John Vanderslice
Cellar Door: another strong whole album. A good case for what the last time I checked was Vanderslice's militantly analog stance—bells, big toms, cool horns. What lyrics! They seem to be recapitulating what the characters in the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive ought be taking from the experience. Extremely imaginative stuff.

"Every Moment" - Rogue Wave
They seemed to become a relatively high-profile group all of a sudden, and it's nice to hear the right pure musical elements to justify that when it happens. They add a certain prog spin to a thoughtful but relaxed Elephant-6-like style. "Endgame" is another quite memorable cut.

"Mr. Brightside" - The Killers
My friend Bob Lloyd's daughter Emma sold me on this one. I love compression, but this is one of those 2000s tracks where the tyranny of mastering volume threatens to smash everything into a roiling dynamic non-range—yet in this case everything holds together for me, and it all just sounds winningly big. This is probably my favorite song that causes the dreaded word "emo" to come to mind; I may be too old to appreciate the unquestionably cute "touching his chest" rhyming with "sick," but I really enjoy the hell out of this one every time. Turn it up to 100:1!

"If You Know Time" - Robyn Hitchcock
I get the impression Robyn Hitchcock is so good at being whimsical that when he engages people seriously, there is an odd tendency for it not to register consciously. No one sings about death more resonantly than Robyn Hitchcock. This one works a clever if perhaps obvious motif: "There's a door inside you/And it wants to slam you shut," etc., but then throws in the seemingly unrelated part about "In the war that's coming/Setting good guys against good/It's always a good cause." It synthesizes a sigh for ultimate concerns, and you're not quite sure what hit you.

"Fate, Say It Again" - Doug Gillard
Gillard was an important member of Guided By Voices (he wrote "I Am a Tree"!), and this coolly delivered song uses some of the same vocabulary—e.g. tricky 1-2-1-2 intervals—to create a pop song that's in many ways more nuanced and fully realized than one ordinarily expects even from GBV. Certainly this is in the top 1% of recordings where every note played on the guitar counts.

"Cabin Essence" - Brian Wilson
Per my countdown organization, there are eight songs from 2004 I rank higher than a key track from Smile, which ought to tell you that I consider 2004 to be an extraordinarily good music year (special thanks to Sue and Joe's 2004 mix CD for its typically valuable input). As with "Wonderful" and "Wind Chimes," Brian's voice has an odd character-actor quality at moments, but then at other moments transforms into the tenor of old, on the whole creating a superior complete result.

"Drink To Me Babe, Then" - A.C. Newman
This is probably my favorite thing from the New Pornographers camp since the explosive Mass Romantic. Besides the beautiful tune (including the very charming synth break), and the indelible line about "the boring choices rich kids choose," this is in the running for being the gold standard of pop music production. Full but spare; here is a fat low end. Those toms woof like nobody's business even on the delicate iPod.

"Mahjong Dijon" - Anton Barbeau
I know and have worked with Anton, so as much as I stand by the quality, this isn't a discovery I came by through honest random exposure. Anton shares an absurdist streak with Robyn Hitchcock; he hits on strong feelings from oblique angles, sometimes making them all the more pleasurable. I probably can't explain why "Mahjong, Dijon, give my life to you" rubs me the right way, but the most rewarding ever application of a Keith Emerson style synthesizer solo is my idea of bankable.

"Let's Get Lost" - Elliott Smith
Tragically, this tender and transporting admission of dysfunctionality is probably truer to life than a spiritual breakthrough like "Say Yes." "Let's Get Lost" is in fact so lovely a selling of the impulse toward isolation that after the song is over, there remains something of an inoculation against temptation to step into that world for real.

"14 Shades of Green" - Chris Stamey
Chris Stamey is the most underrated talent of the rock era, bar none. Watching "Happenstance" on a Swedish TV show on YouTube, I marvel at the level of quality at which he, and in this case the dB's, operate. This is hard rocking Chris—usually a good sign—and with a typical spanner in the works: a presumably sympathetic narrator announces, "here's where we went to church/here's where we robbed that store."

"First of the Gang To Die" - Morrissey
From the most reliable Morrissey album, You Are the Quarry. I wasn't sure I liked this song qua music as much as something like "I'm Not Sorry," but it's settled in as one of the best Morrissey lyric sets, which is as good as lyrics get. Maybe the icing is "He stole from the rich, and the poor/And the not very rich/And the very poor/And he stole all hearts away," but really every line is platinum.

"Naked As We Came" - Iron and Wine
It galls me that this arrangement is so utterly perfect and effective with—I think—just a single acoustic guitar. Jesus, I thought I could play pretty guitar, right? It could be the single most successful instance of that; I'd have to ponder. I can testify that this is one of the rare songs that gets me on the verge of tears. "One of us will die inside these arms" is something like a decent shot at measuring the immeasurable value of a relationship.

"Common People" - William Shatner
Maybe you have to have followed the scorn to which William Shatner's, uh, vocals, have been subjected; the Star Trek era's The Transformed Man may be the most (I would have to say justifiably) ridiculed major label release, with its overdramatized talk-singing of hipster material. With that context: the first minute of this talk-singing of the Pulp standard brings a true flood of emotion. You sense right away that it's really good. Before long, it's also obvious it can rock. Increasingly respectably; it's blowing the doors off the Pulp version. Yet, you realize, it's doing by and large just exactly what The Transformed Man did. It's like that whole sorry endeavor is being incendiarily redeemed. This is all happening too fast. By the time Joe Jackson appears out of nowhere to sing the chorus out-of-his-mind greatly, you realize all bets are off for this amazing piece of music, and perhaps for life in general.

"Death of a City" - Ken Stringfellow
These are words you don't plan to say, but it takes a truly remarkable piece of music to beat William Shatner. Here's another case where I know and have worked with Mr. Stringfellow, so it's for you to judge whether I'm responding too socially, but to my ears it's an uncanny achievement. A piano torch song about a "death of city, and nobody really cares," (are we to think post-grunge Seattle?) is just right in all the lyrical details (I love "closed circuit cameras are making their sweep/They look down on grass turning brown"), but the story here is modulations; it's almost blues, but drier, and unconstrained. It goes way out into space yet is able to bring it home. The extended bridge's return to the verse with "sometimes that's all you get to know" is sublime.